Brian Wilde: Foggy in 'Last of the Summer Wine' | The Independent Brian Wilde: Foggy in 'Last of the Summer Wine' Friday 21 March 2008 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online In the long-running, gentle sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, Brian Wilde established himself as the best-loved "third man" among the ageing trio of eccentrics who whiled away the hours in the Yorkshire Pennines by recalling memories past, mulling over the trials and tribulations of the present, and – despite their years – making plans for the future. He had two spells with the BBC programme written by Roy Clarke, which did much for tourism in the West Yorkshire village of Holmfirth. Wilde joined Last of the Summer Wine as Foggy Dewhirst in 1976, for its third series, to replace the actor Michael Bates, who had played Cyril Blamire since the 1973 pilot but had had to leave two years later after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Foggy was the perfect foil to Bill Owen's carefree, shabby Compo and Peter Sallis as the wry Cleggy.

With quiet pomposity and sometimes bombastic mutterings, he introduced military tactics into their madcap adventures. He managed to clear the village café of customers with his recollections of jungle warfare and, at other times, would shock unsuspecting locals by jumping out from a secret lookout post while camouflaged. Wilde even did some of his own stunts – once, with his leg in plaster, being put in a wheelchair at the top of a hill, which he then had to roll down. One of his favourite episodes was about the reopening of a railway line, which Foggy announced to his friends by blowing a whistle and waving a flag. "I liked it when the engine moved away and we thought Compo was on it and we looked round and he was standing next to us,"recalled Wilde. "The engine was going by itself and we all started running after it – that was a funny scene." Wilde decided to leave in 1985 but was persuaded to return five years later, following the departure of Michael Aldridge, who had filled the gap by taking on the newly created role of the kind and gentle Seymour Utterthwaite. Wilde remained until 1997.

He later reflected: "When I returned to the show in 1990, it was like starting again. There were so many new faces. I'm not sure that I enjoyed the second lot as much as the first. I was older and less happy about location work." Although Last of the Summer Wine provided Wilde with his longest-running television role, he is also remembered by viewers for another classic sitcom, Porridge (1974-77), starring Ronnie Barker as the old lag Fletcher, who cynically exploited the prison system. In a performance of understatement and subtlety, Wilde played Mr Barrowclough, the soft-centred and ineffectual prison warder who believed that those in jail would only learn trust by being shown trust. "You had the old, hard-bitten warders who felt prisoners were inside to be punished, and a new wave of officers coming through who were interested in rehabilitating prisoners," said Wilde, reflecting on the different styles of Barrowclough and his superior, the governor played by Fulton Mackay. Inevitably in a sitcom, Barrowclough was easily conned by Fletcher and other inmates.

He would also confide in Fletcher about his domestic problems – caused by a wife who had affairs with the postman, a marriage-guidance counsellor and others. Wilde's only regret about the role was that it never turned out to be as prominent as in the 1973 pilot, Prisoner and Escort, when Barrowclough was seen taking Fletcher to Slade Prison, in the wilds of Cumbria. "I had lots to do in it," he said, "whereas in other episodes I wasn't given so much, which was sad." Born in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, in 1927, Wilde grew up in Hertfordshire, then trained at Rada and gained a grounding in acting at repertory theatres. He worked his way up to the West End, appearing in the Peter Ustinov play The Moment of Truth (Adelphi Theatre, 1951), and soon landed small parts on screen, starting with the BBC murder-mystery Black Limelight (1952) and the film Street Corner (1953).

Wilde's first experience of sitcom was as Bob, flatmate of the title character – a danceband trumpeter, played by Michael Medwin – in The Love of Mike (1960). He later played the put-upon Mr Salisbury in Room at the Bottom (1967), the first television comedy to be written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, with Kenneth Connor starring as a cunning maintenance man at the Saracens Manufacturing Company. More successful was The Dustbinmen, the Jack Rosenthal-created comedy in which Wilde took over the role of Bloody Delilah, leader of the gang of refuse collectors, for the second and third series (1970). He was also frequently seen in popular dramas, including Z Cars (1963-65), Softly Softly (1966), Dixon of Dock Green (1966-67), The Avengers (1967) and The Troubleshooters (1967). Wild later played the radio station boss Roland Simpson in the first series of the sitcom The Kit Curran Radio Show (1984), starring Denis Lawson as a disc jockey on a small local radio station.

Anthony Hayward Brian Wilde, actor: born Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire 13 June 1927; married Eva Stuart (one son, one daughter); died Ware, Hertfordshire 20 March 2008. More about: Obituary: Brian Wilde | Media | The Guardian The Guardian Thursday 20 March 2008 15.37 EDT First published on Thursday 20 March 2008 15.37 EDT Share on Messenger Close Brian Wilde, who has died aged 80, was a delicate and subtle comedy actor who was especially adept at playing members of the bank-managing and cricketing classes who were not quite as socially elevated as they would like to think, but were nevertheless decent human beings rather than polemical caricatures. The part that most reflected the man was also the one by which he is likely to be best remembered — "Foggy" Dewhurst, the most middle-class member of the retired Yorkshire trio in the BBC television comedy series Last of the Summer Wine, joining in 1976.

Whereas Bill Owen as the scruffy, disreputable Compo was an outrageous nihilist, never worried about — nor even aware of — offending people, Foggy was the ex-executive seeking a rebirth of his golfing career at a snooty club and worried about being discredited by the foul-mouthed Compo and his artisan pig-in-the-middle played by Peter Sallis. If Owen, the veteran of the radical Unity Theatre, had shades of Compo about him, Brian Wilde had shades of Foggy. Early in his career, fearing that cricket might become a dying art on English village greens, he strenuously recruited his actor chums to home matches near where he lived in Ware, Hertfordshire, and to away fixtures. Poor play was not tolerated. One cricketer invited to play was not invited to bowl, which he thought was his strength, but was put in to bat instead; he was bowled out with the first ball. He was not invited again, despite being a television director who might have put future work in Wilde's way. Wilde and Owen got on only with difficulty, just as the two characters they played were always brushing each other up the wrong way.

Wilde confessed to being rather a fusspot and would look askance when Owen, himself a writer, queried lines or asked for changes in the script. In 1985, Wilde left the cast protesting that it was the happiest series he had ever done, but that he and Owen were having difficulties about "minor" things and that they sometimes went for several days without talking. The breaking point came after Owen, the previous year, had announced plans for taking Last of the Summer Wine on the road as a stage touring show. This would not have been the sort of thing that would have been to Foggy's taste and it was not to Wilde's, either. He did not like the play, did not like the idea of touring and said so. Foggy subsequently inherited a decorated egg business in Bridlington and in 1985 was written out of the script. Five years later the charms of the mythical decorated egg factory palled, and Foggy - and Wilde - returned to Last of the Summer Wine, the series consistently attracting high ratings long after it might have been assumed that the formula of three old chaps killing retirement time in a Yorkshire village had exhausted itself and them. He finally left the case in 1997.

After his temporary break with Last of the Summer Wine, Wilde gravitated to another television series in which his persona fitted: Wyatt's Watchdogs (1988), in which he played a retired army major who formed a group of political vigilantes determined to stamp out subversion. This series did not have the broad appeal of Last of the Summer Wine and nor was Major Wyatt as sympathetic a character beneath his risible manner. "Wyatt's just a pompous old fool," Wilde said of the part. "It required very little effort for me to play him because there's plenty of him in me. Ask my wife and children." This displayed more self-awareness than a truly pompous person could have displayed; and it was in a quite different character that Brian Wilde had first sprung to national prominence as a television actor. He played Mr Barrowclough, the easily put-upon prison officer in Porridge (1973-77), always being taken for a ride by the prisoners, and in particular the street-wise Fletcher, played by Ronnie Barker.

Once again steering well clear of cardboard caricature, Wilde played Barrowclough as a gasping, blank-eyed victim who was entirely believable as a man who was oppressed at work and hen-pecked at home. Decency, however, always shone through and prevented the character coming across as either merely pathetic or boring. Wilde was always watchable, even — or perhaps especially — when playing the sort of characters who were easy to overlook. He was very funny in an ostensibly quite different role, as the supervisor who was never quite in charge despite his Herculean efforts in The Dustbinmen (1970) for Granada TV. Born in Lancashire, Wilde was brought up in Hertfordshire and educated at Richard Hale school, Hertford. His first TV appearances were in the early 1960s, when his quiet flair for playing quietly oppressed characters first emerged. One of the roles which showed the way was a middle manager in a factory owned by Andre Morrell, who was hounded from above and below in The Big Ride, a play by John O'Toole for ABC TV's Armchair Theatre slot.

Those who worked with Wilde found him a charmingly quirky character with an almost unheard-of (for an actor) love of his own privacy; and they were not surprised by the direction his career took. A reclusive figure, he dodged interviews, preferring the life of a country gentleman. Wilde was married to Eva Stuart, primarily a BBC radio actor, who appeared with him in Wyatt's Watchdogs as the snobbish owner of an antique shop. Their son Andrew became a film editor and their daughter Sarah studied graphic design. All three survive him. · Brian Wilde, actor, born June 1 1921; died March 20 2008 Last of the Summer Wine - Show News, Reviews, Recaps and Photos - TV.com Last of the Summer Wine Follow EDIT The longest running comedy series in the world started out, as many British comedy successes did, with a 1973 episode of the BBC series "Comedy Playhouse". The basis was simple but complex at the same time, telling the stories of three old men, who in all essence couldn't be more young at heart.

The original trio consisted of Bill Owen, as Compo Simmonite, the scruffiest man in Yorkshire, with only two passions in life: his ferrets and Nora Batty (Kathy Staff). The second man of the group, Norman Clegg, played by Peter Sallis, was from the beginning shown as the most timid of the group, and also the one who gets carried away by the crazy ideas and schemes of his companions, which always seem to get him in trouble. Initially the third man of the group was Blamire, played by Michael Bates, but he was soon replaced by Foggy Dewhurst (Brian Wilde) who always seems to have a scheme or a story that somehow leads to his old days as a war hero... or so he says. In 1986 Brian Wilde left the series, to start filming his new sitcom, which proved to be a wrong move, as the show hadn't the success needed to sustain even a second series. during his 4 year absence from last of the summer wine Michael Aldridge played Seymour, the new third man of the trio, until 1990. Brian Wilde returned to do the next seven years of the show.

When Brian Wilde left the series for the second time in 1997 Frank Thornton replaced him as the new third man on the trio as Truly Truelove of the Yard, an ex-police officer who's always remembering his past, both in the police force and in his former marriage to the former Mrs Truelove. When Bill Owen passed away, his son Tom joined the series, replacing him for the rest of the season as Compo's long lost son, Tom. Compo's permanent replacement would come the next year when Keith Clifford joined the cast as Billy Hardcastle, a man who fancies himself the descendant of Robin Hood. In 2003, the traditional trio became a quartet with the addition of Brian Murphy as Alvin Smedley, Nora Batty's new next door neigbour. With the addition of Alvin, an element of physical humour missing since Compo's death returned to the series. The quartet once again became a trio when Keith Clifford left the series in 2006. In 2009, the series was once again redesigned to allow Sallis and Thornton a reduced role on the series.

A new third man was introduced in the form of Hobbo Hobdyke (Russ Abbott), a former milkman who fancies himself a former MI-5 agent. By combining Hobbo with Alvin and the electrical repairman, Entwistle (Burt Kwouk), a new trio was formed, proving once again the ability of the show to redesign itself over time. The main cast has always been surrounded by some amazing supporting cast throughout the run of the series, who helped to mantain the series as fresh today as it was when it premiered on the BBC.moreless Last of the Summer Wine's Brian Wilde dies - Telegraph Last of the Summer Wine's Brian Wilde dies Brian Wilde, top, died in his sleep By Lucy Cockcroft 6:34PM GMT 20 Mar 2008 Comedy actor Brian Wilde, best known as Walter "Foggy" Dewhirst in Last of the Summer Wine and prison warden Mr Barrowclough in Porridge, has died at the age of 80. Obituary: Brian Wilde The actor died in his sleep at a nursing home in Hertfordshire, after suffering ill health in recent weeks.

He was best known for playing war veteran Foggy who, with his friends Cleggy and Compo, embarked on a series of escapades around the Yorkshire moors in Last of the Summer Wine. He appeared in more than 100 episodes of the BBC comedy between 1976 and 1997. Mr Wilde’s first major role came in 1973 alongside Ronnie Barker in Porridge, another of the BBC’s best-loved programmes, as the ineffectual prison officer Mr Barrowclough. The actor’s son Andrew Wilde said he died of natural causes on Wednesday night. He suffered a fall around seven weeks ago, from which he had not recovered. Nick Young, Mr Wilde’s agent, said: "He will be sadly missed by family and colleagues alike.

"He brought a great deal of laughter into everyone’s lives over the course of his career." His Last of the Summer Wine co-star Peter Sallis, who plays Norman Clegg, said the news was "very, very sad" and that Mr Wilde had been "great fun to work with." Mr Wilde, originally from Lancashire, had roles in the TV series Room At The Bottom (1966) and the film The Jokers (1967) before being cast in Porridge alongside Ronnie Barker. In 1976 he took over from Michael Bates as the third member of a trio of old men in Last of the Summer Wine. He stayed with the series for 9 years before leaving in 1985, to work on other projects, but returned for a second stint between 1990 and 1997. Ill health finally forced him to retire. Last of the Summer Wine producer Alan JW Bell said: "He was a fine actor to work with, very professional. He was an old-school actor - you turned up, knew your lines and played them the very best you could. "He had an enormous warmth to the public when he was off the set.

He didn’t like to hobnob with the actors - when there was a break, he preferred to go a pub around the corner to meet the real people." Set and filmed in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, Last of the Summer Wine’s plot centres around the three friends who revel in youthful stunts, much to the annoyance of the women in the village. The 29th series of the long-running comedy, written by Roy Clarke, is due to be screened later this year. "Last of the Summer Wine" Where There's Smoke There's Barbeque (TV Episode 1993) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error Where There's Smoke There's Barbeque TV-PG | A poll take has the misfortune to stop Foggy and the street. Rumour has it that Howard has a wooden leg, but he is just performing carpentry out of wedlock. Auntie Wainwright sells Norman a portable barbecue.

Director: a list of 261 titles created 05 Oct 2011 a list of 10000 titles created 07 Nov 2012 Title: Where There's Smoke There's Barbeque (31 Oct 1993) 7.7/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Add Image Add an image Do you have any images for this title? Edit Storyline A poll take has the misfortune to stop Foggy and the street. Rumour has it that Howard has a wooden leg, but he is just performing carpentry out of wedlock. Auntie Wainwright sells Norman a portable barbecue.

Obituary: Brian Wilde | Media | The Guardian The Guardian Sunday 23 March 2008 20.03 EDT First published on Sunday 23 March 2008 20.03 EDT Share on Messenger Close Brian Wilde, who has died aged 80, was a delicate and subtle comedy actor who was especially adept at playing members of the bank-managing and cricketing classes who were not quite as socially elevated as they would like to think, but were nevertheless decent human beings rather than polemical caricatures. The part that most reflected the man was also the one by which he is likely to be best remembered - "Foggy" Dewhurst, the most middle-class member of the retired Yorkshire trio in the BBC television comedy series Last of the Summer Wine, which he joined in 1976. Whereas Bill Owen as the scruffy Compo was an outrageous nihilist, never worried about offending people, Foggy was the former executive seeking a rebirth of his golfing career at a snooty club and worried about being discredited by the foul-mouthed Compo and his artisan pig-in-the-middle played by Peter Sallis.

If Owen, the veteran of the radical Unity Theatre, had shades of Compo about him, Wilde had shades of Foggy. Early in his career, fearing that village cricket might be dying, he recruited his actor chums to home matches near where he lived in Ware, Hertfordshire, and to away fixtures. Poor play was not tolerated. One cricketer invited to play was not asked to bowl, which he thought was his strength, but was put in to bat instead; he was bowled out with the first ball. He was not invited again. He and Owen got on only grudgingly. Wilde confessed to being rather a fusspot and would look askance when Owen, himself a writer, queried lines. In 1985, Wilde left the cast protesting that it was the happiest series he had ever done, but that he and Owen were having difficulties about "minor" things. The breaking point came after Owen, the previous year, had announced plans for taking Last of the Summer Wine on the road as a stage show. Wilde did not like the play, did not like the idea of touring and said so.

Foggy inherited a decorated egg business in Bridlington and, in 1985, was written out of the script. Five years later the charms of the mythical decorated egg factory palled, and Foggy - and Wilde - returned to Last of the Summer Wine, the series consistently attracting high ratings. He finally left in 1997. After his temporary break with Last of the Summer Wine, Wilde gravitated to another TV series in which his persona fitted: Wyatt's Watchdogs (1988), in which he played a retired army major who formed a group of political vigilantes determined to stamp out subversion. This series did not have the broad appeal of Last of the Summer Wine and nor was Major Wyatt as sympathetic a character beneath his risible manner. Wilde had first sprung to TV prominence as Mr Barraclough, the put-upon prison officer in Porridge (1973-77), always being taken for a ride by the prisoners, and in particular Fletcher, played by Ronnie Barker. Once again steering clear of cardboard caricature, Wilde played Barraclough as a blank-eyed victim who was believable as a man who was oppressed at work and henpecked at home.

Born in Lancashire, Wilde was brought up in Hertfordshire and educated at Richard Hale school, Hertford. After attending Rada, and a time in repertory, early TV appearances showed his flair for playing quietly oppressed characters. Those who worked with Wilde found him a charmingly quirky character with an almost unheard-of (for an actor) love of his own privacy. Wilde was married to Eva Stuart, primarily a BBC radio actor, who appeared with him in Wyatt's Watchdogs as the snobbish owner of an antique shop. She and their son and daughter survive him. · Brian Wilde, actor, born June 13 1927; died March 20 2008 As Last of the Summer Wine finally ends...How Compo, Cleggie and Co. drove Nora Batty | Daily Mail Online comments The camera was ready, but whether the same could be said of the three nervous actors perched in a perilously wobbly canoe on Yorkshire's fast- flowing and very cold River Wharfe was rather less certain. Shooting on the penultimate episode of the second series of Last Of The Summer Wine, however, could not wait. 'Action!' called director Bernard Thompson.

And so off went the canoe, carrying its anxious crew towards the famous bridge at Bolton Abbey. Last of the great battle-axes: Kathy Staff with troublesome trio Peter Sallis, Bill Owen and Brian Wilde In the bow was Bill Owen, who as a young actor had once been under contract at Rank film studios and who was hoping that the role of 'Compo' Simmonite would give him a final tilt at fame. In the stern was Michael Bates, a former Gurkha officer who played the part of Cyril Blamire for the first two series. And in the middle was a shaking Peter Sallis, probably wishing he'd never accepted the part of Norman Clegg. Sallis, you see, couldn't swim. The canoe shot under the bridge, as planned. Then it started to wobble. And shudder. And then it went over. The non-swimming Sallis would later recall that he managed to escape the river only because he was able to put a foot on a hard object under the water and lever himself out on to the bank. RELATED ARTICLES Share That hard object turned out to be Owen's head.

'To have us row a canoe and shoot the bridge and come out the other side into this choppy water, there's no wonder the bloody thing turned over and no wonder I nearly drowned,' said Sallis. The problem for Sallis, and indeed for many future members of the Summer Wine cast, was that the show's audience thought it was precisely this sort of knockabout comedy that was funny; very funny, in fact. It may have been only a couple of years since the pilot episode had been successfully aired at the beginning of 1973, but Roy Clarke's creation was already changing. There was less talking, more of the glorious Yorkshire scenery and, as the second series took shape, far more of the absurd stunts that kept the show on air for a record-breaking 37 years. The prolific Clarke, who would go on to write Open All Hours for Ronnie Barker, loved writing sharp dialogue. But he adored creating physical comedy, too. His comic hero was Buster Keaton - and it showed.

Over 295 episodes, just about anything on wheels or capable of being put on wheels - beds, sofas, baths, even rocket-powered rollerskates - careered down one of those vertiginously steep Yorkshire hills, almost always with Compo on board. Three men in a boat: Actors Bill Owen, Peter Sallis and Michael Bates. Sallis, who couldn't swim, dreaded the programme's water-based scenes Sallis, the only one of the three to make it from pilot to final episode, would later recall how he would scan new scripts for the dread words: 'All we see of our three is a row of bubbles on the surface of the water.' Later, as the three main male leads grew older, it increasingly fell to stunt men and younger members of the cast to continue the physical comedy tradition, as Jean Fergusson - who played the man-hunting Marina for 25 years - remembers. She recalls one scene that required Marina and her lover Howard Sibshaw, played by Robert Fyfe, to fall out of a boat into some filthy canal water. And like Sallis many years earlier, Fyfe couldn't swim. 'Robert put his hand on top of my head,' said Fergusson.

'I went under this foul, foul water - there's still a pair of earrings somewhere in the Marsden canal.' Getting cold or soaked and often both was part and parcel of being a Summer Wine regular. 'I was introduced to thermal knickers up there,' recalls Juliette Kaplan, who played Howard's bossy wife, Pearl Sibshaw. 'I have never known the wind get so bad.' Stunts, however, were only part of the reason Last Of The Summer Wine attracted up to 18 million viewers. Some said the show harked back nostalgically to a better, simpler time, but those involved in its making insist that's not the case. Summer Wine Land, as it was first dubbed by Sallis, is not something that used to be, it's something that never was. 'It's in a time-warp,' Bill Owen said once. 'Nobody gets old, people don't die, people are always there.' But if it's about anything at all, it's about enduring male companionship and the scrapes that three old schoolfriends get into as they meander aimlessly through the beautiful Yorkshire countryside.

Nora Batty was one of only two female characters to survive from the pilot -the other was cafe owner Ivy, played by Jane Freeman - and thanks to her endless rebuttals of Compo's constant wooing, she had quickly become a firm favourite with audiences. But television's favourite battle-axe bore hardly any resemblance to the cheerful and very welldressed actress who played her, the late Kathy Staff. Wearing a padded man's vest and her famously baggy stockings, she would transform her customarily kindly demeanour into a humourless scowl. 'I never mind how ugly they make me look,' she once said. 'I never had any wish to look glamorous.' Right from the outset, the good-natured joshing and teasing that was another key part of Summer Wine's appeal was very different from what was going on off screen, as original producer Jimmy Gilbert discovered while making the pilot. After filming the three male leads taking a walk, during which one stood in a cowpat, cast and crew retired to the pub where they were to stay, a bleak but popular hostelry that Clarke would later describe as 'Wuthering Heights with strippers'.

And it was here, over dinner, that Michael Bates - aka Cyril - a man that Gilbert recalls as having 'strong Tory views on the Empire, patriotism and pretty much everything else', started to vent his trenchant opinions. This was a red rag for Bill Owen, who had inherited his fiery, Left-wing politics from his tram-driving father. Voices were raised; the atmosphere turned ugly. So ugly, in fact, that the producer was forced to take the pair outside, where he threatened to cancel the entire show. The tactic worked - after half an hour, the two men returned to the table and finished their food. If it’s about anything at all, it’s about enduring male companionship and the scrapes that three old schoolfriends get into Gilbert, however, had learnt an important lesson and swiftly booked his stars into separate accommodation - Owen into a boarding house on the edge of the moors and Sallis and Bates into comfortable hotels. Peace was restored.

Owen would continue to go his own way for his entire 26-year association with the show, preferring to rent the same house each year, on the outskirts of Holmfirth, and settling into a routine: a whisky between 6.30pm and 7.30pm and then an M&S fish pie for dinner. But if that makes him sound as eccentric as Compo, nothing could be farther from the truth. He hated the stubble he had to keep for the part, and refused to leave the set in Compo's clothes. As the producer put it: 'He was always beautifully turned out, quite snappy.' But he was never easy company, as a new member of the cast would soon discover. Having sustained a nasty injury while doing pantomime, Michael Bates found himself too frail to commit to play Cyril in the show's third season, leaving incoming producer Sydney Lotterby with no 'third man'. The trio needed a new leader - and urgently: a man with an immovable sense of his own destiny, superiority and abilities. Above all, a man who was what Yorkshire folk call a 'barmpot' - a bit of an idiot.

Clarke set to work and within days had created a character that propelled Summer Wine into the ranks of classic British sitcoms. Like Michael Bates's Cyril Blamire, Walter 'Foggy' Dewhurst would be an old soldier, but there the resemblance ended. Foggy was an ex-corporal sign-writer, a man still clinging to the minutiae of Army life, an under-achiever with a misfounded but unshakeable self-belief in his abilities as a leader of men - and as a master of unarmed combat. And the team knew exactly the right actor to play him - Brian Wilde, who had made the mild-mannered Mr Barrowclough such a popular character in Porridge. Everybody liked the casting decision and yet the arrival of this gangling, 6ft 3in actor would soon cause a whole new raft of tensions. Despite his amiable screen presence, Wilde had a cantankerous streak, as Alan Bell, who arrived as producer in 1981, soon found.

That Christmas, the Summer Wine Special brought in a bigger audience than the first television screening of Gone With The Wind - 'Nora Batty more popular than Scarlett O'Hara' screamed the newspaper headlines - but as plans for the next series were made, Wilde put his foot down. He wouldn't do it if Bell, who often used time-consuming techniques more common in film-making than television, remained in charge. Amazingly, a face-saving compromise was reached - Bell would go off and film the new Spike Milligan series while Lotterby would return to Summer Wine - but a spin-off feature film, destined to become the popular Christmas special of 1983, remained in Bell's control. But while he may have made his peace with Bell, in the Winnebago Wilde shared with his two co-stars, the temperature was dropping. Indeed, the three jealously guarded their personal space - at the front was Owen, counting his lines to make sure nobody was getting more laughs than him; in the middle was Wilde, and at the back was Sallis, normally lost in the Times crossword. The shenanigans of the male stars were regarded with resigned amusement by female regulars such as Kathy Staff, but the men's privileges did rankle.

In the early days, without their own trailer, Staff and Freeman were forced to find shelter from the Yorkshire weather in Freeman's car. They also got less money. Slapstick: Up to 18 million tuned in to watch Compo's latest attempts to woo Norma Batty But, as a committed Christian, Staff wasn't one to dwell on such injustices. Instead, she and Freeman grew close, with the two women falling into the habit of breaking off from rehearsals in London to take tea at the Ritz. Relations between Owen and Wilde, however, were nothing like as cordial, the two men having a gift for rubbing each other up the wrong way. Owen made no secret of his belief that he was the real star. That irritated Wilde, as did Owen's political views. And relations continued to worsen, particularly when it emerged Wilde was being paid more than the others. In 1984, Wilde had finally had enough of the squabbling, bringing to a close what many believe was a golden age for the show.

But once again, Summer Wine moved on, expanding the cast to include national treasure Thora Hird as Edie Pegden, and bringing in Michael Aldridge as the show's new 'third man', retired headmaster and madcap inv entor Seymour Utterthwaite. Their arrival certainly caused ripples. Gordon Wharmby, who played the popular Wesley Pegden, was so terrified by the prospect of an actress of Hird's stature playing his wife that he had a nervous breakdown and had to be treated (successfully) in a psychiatric hospital. The arrival of the ebullient Aldridge, meanwhile, lightened the atmosphere, particularly in the bar of their regular haunt, the Huddersfield Hotel, where at last Sallis found a fellow spirit. His long-established table for one quickly became a table for two. Hird's arrival proved somewhat more problematic. Hird loved socialising off-set even more than Aldridge, settling down each evening at what quickly became known as Thora's Table, where she would draw on a seemingly bottomless well of reminiscences.

Gracious, funny and sometimes using language that would have had the audience for her Sunday teatime hymn programme, Praise Be, reaching for their smelling salts, Thora loved to talk and talk and talk… so much so that the easygoing Aldridge and Sallis soon refused to go to dinner with her. Later, however, when another national treasure - Jean Alexander, who'd played Hilda Ogden in Coronation Street for 23 years - joined the cast as Auntie Wainwright, Hird found a real friend. As the 91-year-old grew more frail and Thora's Table became a quieter place, it was often Alexander who would help her up to her room and put her rollers in for her before going to bed. It was two legends together, one looking after the other. Aldridge would leave the show after only four years in order to look after his sick wife, newly diagnosed with Alzheimer's, a move that would herald the return, albeit temporarily, of a much mellowed Brian Wilde. But if Wilde was easier company, so, too, was Owen, by now in his mid-70s.

Owen loved the show - and he worked on for another ten years until filming got under way for a Millennium special. Clarke had penned a poignantly multi-layered script that took Compo back to the beaches of Dunkirk, where the character had been evacuated in 1940. Reflecting on fear and death, Last Post And Pigeon called on all Owen's experience and expertise as he moved from humour to sadness in a few lines. But for the first time, the 85-year-old Owen was uncertain of his words and it soon became quite obvious that he was struggling. Like the seasoned pro he was, he persevered, but one day - during filming back in Britain - he sat down heavily and looked wearily up at his director. 'I'd do anything, but I just can't do any more today,' he said. Owen was suffering cancer of the pancreas and had only weeks to live, although it's uncertain whether he knew or not. But there did seem to be a sad acknowledgement that his life was nearing its end.

Sallis remembers sitting in a car with him as filming drew to a close, and Owen turning to him and saying: 'I don't want to go, Peter, there's so much left to do.' Ten days later, on July 12, 1999, Owen died. Last Of The Summer Wine would go on - indeed it would survive another decade - but this time there was no doubt. Without Compo, without that overgrown schoolboy in his silly green hat and folded-over wellies, it would never be the same again. Extracted from Last Of The Summer Wine: The Story Of The World's Longest-Running Comedy Series by Andrew Vine, published by Aurum at £18.99. To order a copy at £17.10 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720. The final episode will be broadcast at 7.30pm on Sunday, August 29, on BBC1.

Farewell Foggy: Star of Summer Wine and Porridge dies in his sleep at the age of 80 | Daily Mail Online Farewell Foggy: Star of Summer Wine and Porridge dies in his sleep at the age of 80 By FIONA BARTON Last updated at 21:37 20 March 2008 He was the kindly, gullible prison officer outwitted each week by Ronnie Barker and his fellow jailbirds in Porridge. He went on to play the self-important ex-army corporal, Foggy, in Last Of The Summer Wine. Brian Wilde, a much-loved star in two of television's favourite sitcoms, has died at the age of 80. Scroll down for more... Last of the Summer Wine: Brian Wilde, centre, as Foggy, with co-stars Bill Owen, left, as Compo and Peter Sallis as Clegg After suffering a fall seven weeks ago, he spent his final days in a nursing home where he died in his sleep of natural causes. He leaves a widow, Eva, a son and daughter.

Wilde began his career in 1966 with roles in the TV series Room At The Bottom and the films The Jokers and Carry On Doctor. But his big break came in 1973, when he starred in an episode of Seven of One, a series of individual stories starring Ronnie Barker. Wilde played Mr Barrowclough, a bumbling warder escorting Norman Stanley Fletcher across the moors to his prison cell. The episode proved so popular that it was developed into a series. Porridge ran from 1974 to 1977. Wilde joined Last Of The Summer Wine – now the world's longest running sitcom – for its third series in 1976. He joined Bill Owen (Compo) and Peter Sallis (Clegg) for nine years before leaving in 1985. He returned in 1990 and remained for another seven years, appearing in a total of 116 episodes. James Gilbert, former BBC head of comedy and a director of Summer Wine, believed the secret of its success lay in its innocence. He said: "Like PG Wodehouse, it is set in the land of eternal summer.

If I was ever in doubt about how to direct a scene, I would think how they would react if they were children." Wilde agreed, describing his character as pompous but "basically very silly". Away from the screen, the Lancashire-born actor, who lived in Ware, Hertfordshire, was an intensely private man. Scroll down for more ... Partners in crime: Brian Wilde and Ronnie Barker in BBC comedy series Porridge Peter Sallis, who met him at RADA when they were teenagers, said yesterday: "If you saw him in Porridge or Last of the Summer Wine then you knew as much about him as I did. He was a private person, not in a stuffy way, but he didn't mix socially. "If you saw him in character as Foggy you get a pretty good idea of what Brian was like. His work was exemplary." Summer Wine creator Roy Clarke said: "He was one of my favourite actors. He was absolutely impeccable with every line. You could give him all sorts of convoluted speech and he never made a fluff.

A wonderful actor and a very nice man." And producer Alan JW Bell added: "He was perhaps the best of the Summer Wine 'third men' – the most loved of all the characters. "He was a fine actor to work with, very professional. He was an old school actor – you turned up, knew your lines and played them the very best you could."He had an enormous warmth to the public when he was off the set." Wilde's agent Nick Young said: "He will be sadly missed by family and colleagues alike. He brought a great deal of laughter into everyone's lives."

Question: In 'Last of the Summer Wine' what character did Brian Wilde play?
Answer: FOGGY